Trump's immigration ban doesn't include the country most of the 9/11 hijackers came from

President
Donald Trump with the executive order halting immigrants from
some majority-Muslim countries from entering the
US.Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty
Images

President Donald Trump's executive order barring immigrants from
seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US doesn't
include Saudi Arabia, the country where most of the 9/11
attackers came from.

In fact, the executive order doesn't apply to any
of the countries where the 9/11 attackers were from. Egypt, the
United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon were also left off the list.

The executive order temporarily bars citizens from Iran, Iraq,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from traveling to the US.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway
said over the weekend that the order was "a ban on
prospective travel from countries ... that have a recent history
of training and exporting and harboring terrorists."

Trump also cited the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New
York City and Washington, DC, directly several times in his
executive order.

"The visa-issuance process plays a crucial role in detecting
individuals with terrorist ties and stopping them from entering
the United States," the order
said." Perhaps in no instance was that more apparent than the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when State Department
policy prevented consular officers from properly scrutinizing the
visa applications of several of the 19 foreign nationals who went
on to murder nearly 3,000 Americans."

Fifteen of those 19 foreign nationals were from Saudi Arabia.
Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia, and his family had
strong connections to the Saudi royal family. The rest of the
attackers were from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia in particular, however, has a long history of
exporting Wahhabism, a strict strain of Islam that has been
blamed for fueling extremism around the world.

Farah Pandith, America's first special representative to Muslim
communities at the State Department,
wrote for The New York Times that in each of the 80 countries
she visited from 2009 to 2014, "the Wahhabi influence was an
insidious presence, changing the local sense of identity;
displacing historic, culturally vibrant forms of Islamic
practice; and pulling along individuals who were either paid to
follow their rules or who became on their own custodians of the
Wahhabi world view."

Pandith continued: "Funding all this was Saudi money, which paid
for things like the textbooks, mosques, TV stations and the
training of Imams." She called on countries to "reject free Saudi
textbooks and translations that are filled with hate" and "expose
the Saudi financing of extremist groups masquerading as cultural
exchanges and 'charity' organizations."

Trump also has a personal financial link to Saudi Arabia, as The
Times
noted. The Trump Organization registered eight companies in
Saudi Arabia in 2015.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer noted over the weekend
that the seven countries included in Trump's executive order were
first flagged by the Obama adiministration as "countries of
particular concern" for visa screening.